A second major business-software meltdown in three days left workers at thousands of companies locked out of payroll, benefits and HR systems over the weekend, after Workday — the cloud platform that handles those functions for roughly 11,500 employers — suffered a widespread outage starting Friday evening.

Downdetector logged nearly 3,000 user reports beginning shortly after 5 p.m. ET on Friday, as employees nationwide found themselves unable to log in, clock in or out, request time off, or access open-enrollment benefits paperwork. Workday's own login page greeted users with a message reading simply that service would be "restored as quickly as possible." As of Saturday, the company had not given a timeline for full recovery.

What went wrong

Workday told the San Francisco Chronicle that the trouble began while engineers were testing backup systems, and that the problem left some information in an inconsistent state, prompting the company to place parts of its platform into maintenance mode. A company spokesperson said in a statement that "we sincerely apologize for the challenges this is causing impacted customers" and that teams were "working urgently" to investigate and fix the issue.

Workday's client list reads like a cross-section of corporate America: Target, Walmart, Netflix, Salesforce, PNC Bank, Chipotle, Southwest Airlines, Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab, Nasdaq and General Electric are among the companies that run HR and payroll through the platform, according to Workday's own customer listings. The cities of Philadelphia, Dallas, Seattle, Charlotte and Denver, along with the U.S. Department of Energy and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, are also listed as customers. It was not immediately clear which of those organizations' employees were actually affected, since being a Workday client does not mean every feature went dark at once.

YOUR SERVICE WILL BE RESTORED AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE

For some workers the timing bit hardest on open enrollment, the annual window when employees lock in health insurance and other benefits for the coming year. Companies that route enrollment through Workday left staff unable to complete paperwork Friday night, with no clear word on whether deadlines would be extended.

Not an isolated glitch

The outage landed just two days after a separate, unrelated disruption knocked out Microsoft's Outlook and Teams services worldwide, frustrating workers across North America who rely on both platforms to get through a workday — in more ways than one. Fox Business reported that the Workday failure marked the second major enterprise-software outage to hit corporate America in a matter of days, though the two incidents do not appear to be connected. Microsoft has said it ruled out a cyberattack or AI-related malfunction as the cause of its own outage and is preparing a post-incident report.

Workday has weathered outages before, including a 2023 data-center power failure that disrupted university payroll systems for hours, but this one hit a far broader swath of private employers and government agencies at once — and arrived with no clear cause beyond the company's acknowledgment that something went sideways during routine testing.

What's next

Workday said it would post customer updates roughly every 30 minutes while the investigation continues, though it has not released a root-cause report or a restoration estimate. For HR departments, the more immediate headache is whether payroll runs and open-enrollment deadlines scheduled for the coming days will need to be pushed back — a decision likely to fall to individual employers once Workday confirms its systems are stable again.